ORENDA NEWS:

"Orenda Records is a small Southern California label that punches above its weight... Orenda’s offerings are informed by rock, modern classical, and jazz, and combine these genres in a natural, organic fashion... Orenda’s musicians grew up in a post-Braxton era where musical styles are viewed on a continuum rather than as individual silos of expression."–Avant Music News

"It was a cool, overcast morning when I went to meet Eron Rauch for coffee and to brainstorm for a new artistic collective. He was waiting, mug in hand, by the time I arrived and had a gritty, punk-rock-looking, hand-stitched collection of xeroxed images that were nothing short of captivating. Filled with images reflecting an America, and particularly a Los Angeles, slightly askew, and degraded through copying copies, I found myself pouring over the artwork. Seductive and dangerously suggestive pictures of legs, parties, masks, abandoned hotel rooms, and forgotten architecture echoed scandalous experiences amidst a flailing economy, and a somehow tarnished take on a city of sun. While perusing the pages of this gnarly DIY photo-book, we mused about the state of art in the Los Angeles underground, and looked toward a future full of collaboration and inter-disciplinary boundary pushing, challenging each other to take our art further. A few years later, we co-founded Orenda Records, and Eron's imagery has shaped every part of the look of our label, and has pushed our artists (including myself) to be more demanding and critically discerning about our work. An invaluable collaborator, a brilliant artist, and a true friend, it's my true honor to be launching our new visual art series with a beautifully printed limited edition of this truly incredible photo-book." —Daniel Rosenboom, July 2015

The Apartment Homes Fake Book by Eron Rauch is a fractured account of love, loss, and photographic memory created during recovery years after the 2008 economic crash. Taking the form of a large-format photocopy manuscript, the disjointed and idiosyncratic mix of personal, found, and urban landscape images waver in a toner-stained haze of instability. Released in July 2015 by Orenda Records, this 92 page, staple-bound 11x17” book is the cumulation of an artistic dialog that with musician and composer Daniel Rosenboom that started with the 2014 album Fire Keeper.

"During the recent economic crash and Great Recession, I, along with many Americans, became obsessed with the the feeling that that there is no possible way to assemble all the fragments of the past to make a future. My relationship was dissolving and even my art projects, previously so controlled and directed, were fracturing under the constant anxious assaults from these dragging years. But at one late-night experimental music warehouse show, a random conversation sparked my interest. It was revealed to me that the now-omnipresent bundles of bound sheet music that the musicians carried were born as bootleg song compilations made by the mob in the 30s and 40s. These “fake books” were notoriously riddled with errors, omissions, weird song selections, and smudged printing, but nonetheless became the foundation of the angular, undulating, improvised sounds of avant jazz.

"With this shard of lost history in the back of my mind, I started weaving together images from everything I was working on in my studio and then some: rejected frames, mistakes, sketches, experiments, research images, and even personal snapshots. Working late at night in the local copy shop, neon lights buzzing, cheap coffee by my side, I basically started bootlegging my own artwork. In this flurry of papers, I focused on the ways that photographs respond to sequencing, implication, and resonance.

"In an unexpected turn, the deliberately incomplete bits and pieces of the Apartment Homes Fake Books that I handed out interested the Los Angeles-based trumpet player and composer, Daniel Rosenboom. We started exploring these images in a series of sets, compositions, and further volumes of photographs. Eventually a number of photographs became the inspiration for songs on the album Fire Keeper and that album inspired the second half of the book. I’m not sure if I found a way to bridge the vast chasm of history, but some small thread of catharsis emerged, pointing at the disjointed, painful, but richly layered present."